Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Politics In General Where have all the conservatives gone?

Persons in crisis resist the request to talk because, as Stokoe points out, cultural idioms encourage us to put little value on “talk”. After all, “talk is cheap” and “talking the talk” is less meaningful than “walking the walk”. However, a single word substitution could be enough to save a life.
Perhaps because we do not have equivalent cultural idioms, “speak” seems to work. In real conversations between a negotiator and person in crisis, when the negotiator says “speak” (“I wanna come down and I wanna speak to you…”) they get their desired response. In some cases, the person in crisis interrupts the negotiator to begin talking. Despite being near-synonyms, one word is loaded with context that makes it ineffective in these scenarios, while the other is free of those associations.